• a great list
• good creative
• a well honed process

Over the next few weeks, we'll explore each of these in detail.

Rule #1: Every single entry must be checked before you launch a campaign.

As you may have already learned, you cannot buy a great list. You may be able to buy an adequate list and supplement it. In my experience, most lists are, well, crap. One such list I licensed last fall for a clinical trials software company had 40,000 contacts and cost $14,000 for the annual subscription. While it was probably the best available commercial list for this particular company, it was full of errors.

Here's what $14,000 gets you:

• misspelled and transposed names
• bad titles
• incorrect mailing addresses and phone numbers
• multiple entries for individuals (3 John Smiths in Indianapolis representing one guy who held successive positions with different companies).
• companies that had been acquired or were no longer in business

So what's the worst that can happen to you when you license a list like this? The worst I can imagine is that you send a personalized email with an embarrassing error to a customer or valuable prospect.

Dear empty,

Drug discovery is a race, and time to data lock is critical...

Oops. There goes all your hard work.

This is why you have to check every single entry. Hire motivated temps or college kids to do it. See Rule #3 as to why.

Rule #2: Database companies are in the business of selling databases, not ensuring that you have success with your campaign.

A manufacturing database vendor sells a database of 400,000 manufacturing contacts with a 30% fill rate of email addresses. Less than 10 (yes, 10!) of these addresses are deliverable...the rest are general company mailbox addresses or completely made up addresses. And this is an expensive database.

Here's a quote from a real live sales person at this database company:

Sure, email sent to info@company.com will get forwarded to the correct recipient.

Not in my universe, lady! It took several days of work to manually research and create email addresses for this important list, which resulted in an 80% fill rate for email addresses for a targeted subset of the database and a 60% delivery rate against those addresses. A bit better than the 0% rate we would have gotten if we had simply gone with the data in the database!

The best lists are generated, developed and enhanced inhouse. It takes a lot of work, but the effort is well worth it. A good inhouse list may well be your company's most valuable asset, one that you can tap over and over to generate short term revenue and long term customers.

Rule #3: Inhouse lists take years to develop

The truth is that you can buy a list and get results in a matter of days or weeks. But you can't build a sustainable business on this strategy; instead you need to commit to a long term strategy of building your own internal resource.

And step one is assessing the quality of your current inhouse list and developing a plan to improve that list and to supplement it over time with substantial numbers of new leads.

Thanks for reading!